Thank you ,MM
Your reply was concise and informative.
On the other had we are left with the question of evils origin.
God is much more than we THINK him to be.
Look at the early battles of Israel against the inhabitants of the land. GOD TOLD them many times to cut the ppl down even to EVERY hoof nothing could be left standing, not man, woman, child, nor animal. He created the LOF for the devil and his angels.
It is not a blame game, just a question, looking for its answer.
There IS ONLY GOD, and none else as in Greek mythology, or pagan worship. He existed before time was created for man, the Ancient Of Days,Alpha and Omega.
We do not have a time as to when God created the angels,so it's impossible to gage information about their creation.
We do know that SIN entered Lucifer, be it pride , arrogance, ect, resulting in his expulsion from heaven to earth.
God had and has a plan for this earth but we walk in his timeline, not our own.
God has traits that we can see in his word, He laughs, He repents, He can become angry and enraged, he has wrath, He has unbelievable love, on and on it can go.
Free will cannot be accountable for sin and evil, for first the thought must be..............and the heart must conceive.
D3, your question elicits thought. How about this: When we read scripture, where was evil first mentioned? Was it not in the heart of the angel of light, Satan?
In circles of philosophy, which is the pursuit of truth, what has been surmised, based upon what is actually told to us in the inspired word of God, is that Satan originally allowed something to take root and sprout in his inner thoughts about his own beauty and power given to him. He obviously knew that there was none greater than God, so he declared that he would be AS God.
The price of freedom, as can be seen originating from a creature that had that very freedom, is the choice to do what is right, or to do what is wrong. That was the danger the Lord knew existed, and rather than to clamp down on the angels with the iron fist of control as to whether they could choose to do evil or not, the Lord gave to them total freedom.
Now, if I may, let me observe for you the sheer wisdom behind the Lord's choice to allow total freedom in His creation. In this freedom, each creature has, does and will exhibit and live out the choices between seeking righteousness, or seeking self-gratification and fulfillment. It's a grand test of each creature. Any king on this earth would want servants who were tested and true, because otherwise he could end up with a knife in his back, or poison in his drink. The Lord, through the use of freedom and free moral agency, has chosen to allow each creature to pass through this veil of testing, with Him separating them all out in the end as to who will be in His Kingdom, and who will not. That is perfect justice.
In the midst of it all, and even before it was all set in motion, we're told that Christ was slain from the foundations of the world:
Revelation 13:8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are
not written in the book of life of
the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
This shows to us that the Lord took responsibility for bringing about a level of freedom that He knew would result in some, or most, of His creatures choosing rebellion and sin (evil). Evil and sin can be defined at a very basic level, and that being disobedience. How can disobedience exist apart from freedom? Well, it can't, with which I'm sure we can both agree.
So, when you say that evil cannot arise from freedom, what other origin is there apart from blaming the Lord Most High, and that He intentionally created it? That is a serious charge, if that is what you contending, and I would simply have to call you out on the carpet on that, calling upon you to defend that accusation...if you can. BTW, this is not aimed only at you. This is a charge I have heard from others through the years, asking that they too defend that belief, and to this day, I have yet to hear anything above the level of emotional argumentation and philosophical meandering that led to no real answers that are verifiable within scripture, nor philosophically sound.
If one is going to say that the Lord created the thought and feel of pride in Satan, from which the sin took root, then I'd simply have to ask where that is stated, because apart from an actual statement lending credible foundation for such a belief, it remains nothing more than human invention.
If anything, the Lord may have given to Satan a level of beauty that was so strikingly and profoundly above any others in Heaven that, well, the distinction was vast enough that Satan did indeed see himself as quite set apart from all the others of God's creation, but that does not excuse the path Satan chose of his own free will. You see, there is only freedom or bondage when it comes to moral agency. There's nothing in between. It's not shades of gray, unless someone can show such from scripture. Satan could have done to the Lord, and confessed the turmoil within himself, seeking counsel, but, instead, he chose to feed that pride, which led to his rebellion and to seek equality with his Creator.
See? Choice. Was it forced? Not by any measure we can ascertain from scripture.
MM